Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India

The Sanskritist Monier Monier-Williams, for example, complained that English literary study unduly filled the minds of Indians with thoughts of rising above what he called their assigned position in life. He warned that in training Indians in the art of self-expression and self-scrutiny, English education had taken on a subversive role: “Those who are unsuccessful in gaining appointments will not turn to manual labour, but remain discontented members of society and enemies of our government, converting the little real education they have received into an instrument to injure us by talking treason and writing seditious articles in native journals.”¹ Formerly, declared George Norton in a speech in Madras, Indian subjects obeyed their British rulers out of ignorance, because they regarded them as beings of a superior order and “crouched before us as clothed with an irresistible power.”² But with the spread of education the tendency of familiarity was to lessen wonder, as “we have educated the people so as to enable them to judge us by a more correct standard … Those whom they took for gods, as the ancient Mexicans and Peruvians mistook Cortez and Pizarro, they now find to be men like themselves, their superiors, it is true, but still errant fallible men.”³ A. P. Howell in his numerous reports issued periodically over two decades from 1850 to 1870 upbraided his own government for having chosen to undertake “the direct training of whole generations above their own creed, and above that sense of relation to another world upon which they base all their moral obligations.”⁴ An English literary education that ostensibly set out to root Indians in a world of reciprocal obligations came to be attacked for achieving the very opposite, and Howell, along with others, strenuously argued that only a practical or non-humanistic education could successfully teach social or civic duty, hitherto associated primarily with a literary curriculum.

This chapter explores the connections between the declining importance of literary study for moral education, the renewed emphasis on English as a branch of practical study, and the rhetoric of social stratification and division of labor. The moral motive, which brought English literature into the Indian curriculum in the first place to reinforce notions of social duty, obligation, and service to the state, is disengaged from English studies as a result of British apprehensions that their Indian subjects were being encouraged to rise above their stations in the name of self-improvement and so challenge the authority of the ruling power. The humanistic idea of education as moral and intellectual elevation is drastically revised to fit a conception of education that goes as far back as Plato, which sought to confirm individuals in the social class into which they were born.

Significantly, this revision in the late 1850s (which, incidentally, coincides with the taking over of the East India Company by the British Crown and also with the Mutiny of 1857) reappropriates the secularist character of the earliest stages of the history of English in India. As discussed in earlier chapters, missionary groups, protesting what they saw as governmental arrogance in severing literary studies from the influence of religious culture, were led to suspect that the official policy of secularism in India had been instituted in a spirit of middle-class experimentation and that India was merely being used as a testing ground for secular theories of education. If secularism in British India eventually faced the kind of opposition it experienced in England, it was largely due to the fierce resistance put up by missionaries like Alexander Duff who unequivocally denounced it as an expression of British middleclass, laissez-faire interests. The missionaries’ relative success in educational matters is gauged by the fact that for nearly three decades, from the mid-1820S to the mid-1850S, English studies derived its main rationale from the impulse to Christianize. This was true even in the so-called non-denominational schools like the Hindu College in Calcutta, which was set up by a small group of Bengali upper-caste men and later received substantial funding from the British government. English education was so closely associated with Christian instruction in the institutions receiving government patronage that at least one native convert was known to have said that “the best Missionary institutions are the Government schools.”⁵

But even as early as 1835, with Macaulay’s minute, the religious motive showed signs of stress. It is worth noting that despite Macaulay’s outrage over British patronage of Oriental literature and his advocacy of the inclusion of English literature in the Indian curriculum, at no point did he urge the study of English on purely humanistic or moral grounds. For Macaulay the separation between the cultural and the moral was a matter of no great difficulty, and it was possible for him to plead for the cultural value of English literature without necessarily having to base his appeal on moral or religious grounds. Macaulay was widely read in the writers of antiquity, but he came away from the reading with the conviction that their worth had to be measured in terms of what they had to offer by way of “useful results,” which to him amounted to very little.⁶ On the whole, Macaulay’s interest did not lie in the deeper moral reflections of the ancient writers. Reluctant to consider moral arguments apart from their political implications, he was drawn to Bacon precisely because of Bacon’s lack of concern with the grounds of moral obligation. Bacon’s appeal for Macaulay lay in the fact that in raising only the kinds of questions that led to useful results, Bacon dispensed with insurmountable metaphysical questions. In the tradition of Bacon and the Utilitarians, Macaulay acknowledged that societies and laws existed only for the purpose of increasing the sum of private happiness. It might be expected that, as a Whig, he would hold liberty as a supreme end, yet he consistently and emphatically held that liberty was no more than a useful means of promoting the security of persons and property.

The blending of political and moral considerations, with the inevitable subordination of the moral argument, is evident in Macaulay’s justifications for reforms. He supported parliamentary reform less for its own sake than because of the dangers inherent in withholding it. Liberty had greater meaning for him as a stabilizing force on government: free expression revealed discontents, which could then be dealt with in an appropriate manner and by timely concessions. Morality and policy were for Macaulay identical and interchangeable terms. In a distinct shift of emphasis from the Whig tradition, he emphasized what was useful rather than what was good in the course of defending policies. Without abandoning the traditional Whig rationale for toleration and liberty, Macaulay, as a spokesman for a new generation of Whigs, added a more amoral, functional tone. As a result, he exposed himself to charges of Philistinism and of reducing pure intellectualism to insignificance.⁷

Macaulay’s minute paved the way for the transition from religious to secular motives in English education. By mid-century a pedagogy of Christian morality gradually yielded to a pedagogy of worldly knowledge geared to the various occupations of life. Secularization freed the British government in India to pursue an educational policy that actually confirmed, not altered, the patterns of stratification already indigenous to Indian society. It introduced new relationships whose tendency was to transform society from a basis of status to one of contract. To give one example, the Law Commission in 1862 made law a civil institution and separated its professional study from religion—any religion—in order to break the priestly monopoly in legal studies. But though this decision was characterized as a move to make law “a fit object of pursuit not limited to a small priestly order but open to all interested persons regardless of caste or creed,”⁸ the recruitment of students to the study of law still followed traditional caste patterns. Perhaps this is because the more “objective” criteria of admission that were added, such as certificates of character, marks of distinction, and fixed qualifications established by the Sadr Diwani Adalat, still depended on a system of evaluation drawn from a religious hierarchy. But the new system did not have the looseness or fluidity of the older one, which tacitly acknowledged indefinable qualities such as self-cultivation and self-discipline as criteria for inclusion. The importance of paper qualifications in a secularized society marks the growth of a contractual principle of social relationships, often described as the basis of a class concept in social development.

The hostility to a moral emphasis in education coincided with new legislation aimed at stratification of classes. The direction was set in the 1854 dispatch issued by Sir Charles Wood, also known as Lord Halifax. The dispatch can only be described as functionalist in character: the rhetoric of morality gave way to the demands of political economy, from which evolved a scheme of education that set out to create a middle class serving as an agency of imperialist economy and administration and, through it, to initiate social change through a process of differentiation. Though the dispatch acknowledged a need to ensure the probity of Indian bureaucrats by instruction in English principles, the main emphasis fell on the expediency of creating a class that might emulate Europeans in the development of India’s resources and increase demand for the consumption of British goods, for the advancement of European knowledge and European culture

will teach the natives of India the marvellous results of the employment of labour and capital, rouse them to emulate us in the development of the vast resources of their country, guide them in their efforts, and gradually, but certainly, confer upon them all the advantages which accompany the healthy increase of wealth and commerce; and, at the same time, secure to us a large and more certain supply of many articles necessary for our manufactures and extensively consumed by all classes of our population, as well as an almost inexhaustible demand for the product of British labour.⁹

While meting out a fare of useful and practical skills to the lower orders of society, the dispatch simultaneously promoted the growth of a small but influential intellectual class through scholarships to the proposed universities of Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras. This class, which was largely drawn from the indigenous learned classes, was targeted for eventual induction into government service. The bias toward selective higher education is apparent in the fact that while scholarships were increased for those seeking admission to universities, government funds were withdrawn from lower schools and the practice of charging fees introduced. The government abolished stipends in these schools and replaced them with grants in aid, with the added proviso that these grants were to be given only to those schools already charging fees. This condition, which runs contrary to the avowed intention to expand educational opportunities, was justified on the grounds that an entirely gratuitous education was not valued and the practice of charging fees would at once promote more regular attendance and increase the value of education; grants in aid ceased to function as responses to need and were reduced to the status of rewards for complying with government requirements. The missionary Alexander Duff accidentally stumbled upon this piece of wisdom through the sad experience in his own school when he realized that it was the anticipation of free books rather than the attractions of Christianity that drove the poor to them. Huge numbers of Indian children were known to flock to new schools and, once the free books were distributed, run away with them and never turn up again. As Duff sadly concluded, book pages found their way not into the minds and hearts of “benighted” peoples, but into bazaars and marketplaces as wastepaper for retailers.

The universities were set up primarily as a way of eliminating the cumbersome lists the government had hitherto relied on to recruit meritorious students for public employment. Till 1857 the practice was for government colleges to draw up lists of the students who had distinguished themselves in literary attainments and these lists were then made available to the government. But because of bureaucratic inefficiency, the lists were never submitted systematically, with the result that many educated Indians never came to the notice of the government. The returns of 1852, for example, showed that only two gazetted officers had come from the government colleges, and as for the others listed in the Bengal Gazette, it could only be assumed that their educational qualifications were not of the high level that the government would have preferred its recruits to have.¹² With the establishment of the universities these lists were dispensed with, for under a centralized system that submitted all students to a common examination the acquisition of a university degree and university distinctions automatically brought the most capable young men to the government’s notice.

The move to establish a centralized university system linked with public employment came out of the need to demonstrate that an arts curriculum had tangible material rewards.¹³ The discouragingly small number of educated Indians going into public service was explained by the fact that young men who had passed an arduous examination in philosophy and literature were disinclined to accept the subordinate jobs (chiefly of a clerical nature) open to them in government service. In 1825 Rammohun Roy wrote an indignant letter to the governor-general-incouncil deploring the exclusion of Indians from the political privileges he claimed they had enjoyed under Muslim rule:

In former times Native fathers were anxious to educate their children according to the usages of those days, to qualify them for such offices under government … and young men had the most powerful motives for sedulously cultivating their minds in laudable ambition of rising by their merits to an honourable rank in society; but under the present system, so trifling are the rewards held out to Native talent that hardly any stimulus to intellectual improvement remains.¹⁴

This was a liability of English education that William Adam, author of the comprehensive report on education in Bengal, had warned of as early as 1835 when he wrote: “[The Indians] have been raised out of one class of society without having a recognized place in any other class.”¹⁵ The highest position that educated young men could aspire to was the meager-paying one of copying clerk, a position that required the mechanical copying of English without understanding. Without honor or reward, these meager employment prospects were adversely affecting the traditional Indian reverence for education and the self-esteem that usually accompanied it. The elevation of circumstances that English instruction had promised was slowly being eroded, as the 1882 Education Commission reported, by “the narrow circle of [the Indian’s] life; the absence of facile ties for travel, whereby his sympathies and experience might be enlarged; the strong temptation to lay aside his studies … all help to dwarf the moral and intellectual growth, and to foster those faults.”¹⁶

The Indian university system evolved from a theory of culture often referred to as the Filtration Theory, which was first enunciated by Macaulay and later refined by John Stuart Mill in his dispatches from the office of the East India Company. The theory ostensibly had its origins in a set of practical realities: because of the extraordinary costs in training and recruiting teachers of English, a complete education that began with a thorough study of English was within the reach of only a very small proportion of Indians. But even though only this class would receive an English education, their more important function would be to act as teachers and translators of useful books, through which they would communicate to the native literature and to the native community “that improved spirit” they had imbibed from the influence of European ideas and sentiments. The theory required the few to teach the many.

A unified culture was not only thought possible in a differentiated society, but in fact deemed essential to it. John Stuart Mill envisioned culture as at once an agency of unification and division between social classes, declaring in one of his dispatches that “the character which may be given to the classes possessed of leisure and natural influence, ultimately determines that of the whole people.”¹⁷ The theory operated on the principle that only those who had the time and the leisure to acquire knowledge of the English language and English literature in the classical manner should be encouraged to do so. In the meantime, the rest of the population was consigned to studying their own languages but receiving Western ideas through them at the same time. In employing the criterion of leisure to distinguish the few from the many, Mill evoked the formulation of his father, who had earlier asked the question:

As we strive for an equal degree of justice, an equal degree of temperance, an equal degree of veracity, in the poor as in the rich, so ought we to strive for an equal degree of intelligence, if there were not a preventing cause. It is absolutely necessary for the existence of the human race, that labour should be performed, that food should be produced, and other things provided, which human welfare requires. A large proportion of mankind is required for this labour. Now, then, in regard to all this portion of mankind, that labours, only such a portion of time can by them be given to the acquisition of intelligence, as can be abstracted from labour. The difference between intelligence and the other qualities desirable in the mind of man, is this: … Time must be exclusively devoted to the acquisition of it; and there are degrees of command over knowledge to which the whole period of human life is not more than sufficient. There are degrees, therefore, of intelligence, which must be reserved to those who are not obliged to labour.¹⁹

James Mill’s hesitation in providing for the training of the mind across all classes undercut the concept of a unified culture that he simultaneously sought to promote. The conflict in Mill is that ideally he wants to see all classes receive intellectual training but he cannot accept the disruption to the existing social divisions that it implied. For, though logically it might be difficult to argue with the statement that one must be released from other occupations to devote oneself to the serious pursuit of knowledge, the treachery of using that argument as a justification for dispensing with the education of the laboring classes was sensed even by Charles Wood in his educational dispatch. Indeed, he was farsighted enough to recognize the dangerous implications of a theory of education that pretended to unite while keeping separate. What distinctly set Wood’s dispatch apart from the earlier dispatches of Macaulay and James and John Stuart Mill was a revision of the priorities in what was to be achieved by the theory of downward filtration and there was less talk now of high culture and more of useful education. The dispatch conceded the success of the Filtration Theory insofar as it had ensured a new generation of Indians trained to a high level of excellence in the study of English literature, but it lamented that these high attainments remained confined only to a small number of persons. It insisted that European knowledge would never filter downward to a larger base unless it was of a “less high order, but of such a character as may be practically useful to the people of India in their different spheres of life.”²⁰ There was an implicit recognition in the dispatch that the British government now had to contend with the consequences of an educational policy based on the Filtration Theory as conceived by Macaulay and the two Mills, for instead of a monolithic society linked by a single set of ideas emanating from the West, as originally intended, it had produced a stratified society in which boundaries between the select few educated in English and the masses had grown so sharp as to thwart the percolation of European ideas down to the latter in any form, even through translations.

Ironically Orientalism, which ostensibly aimed to protect the native culture from total oblivion, sharpened the lines of stratification. Wherever there flourished institutions of Oriental learning (such as the one at Tirhoot, for instance) there happened also to be the highest illiteracy and the fewest number of vernacular schools, as recorded by British officials.²¹ The effects of Orientalist policy are visible in the history of Sanskrit College, which was established in 1823 after the founding of Hindu College. Intended to teach primarily the English language and literature, Hindu College was open to boys of all classes and castes on the payment of five rupees per month, whereas Sanskrit College, which was established for the exclusive cultivation of Sanskrit literature, was open only to Brahmins, who got a monthly stipend to study grammar, general literature, rhetoric and prosody, law, arithmetic, and theology.²²

Though from its earliest involvement in Indian education the British objective was the abolition of caste feeling, the actual practice suggests otherwise. In the very manner that students were recruited and institutions of learning established it is clear that there was a capitulation to caste sentiments aimed at conciliating the Brahmins, whose position in Hindu society had been eroded with British rule. For example, the only way the upper ranks could be enticed to the government schools was by preventing a mixture of castes and the lower castes were either placed in separate classes or siphoned off to the missionary schools, which became associated in the public mind with lower-caste education. Sensing economic opportunities, the upper castes were lured to an education in English language and literature that was offered in the government schools in the anticipation that it “will raise them among their countrymen [and] they will become again objects of respect and admiration, and attain an influence upon grounds on which it is not only safe, but desirable they should possess it.”²³ The presence of two separate institutions, the government and the missionary schools, tended to reinforce caste distinctions and gave the impression that there were two castes in education, with the Brahmins attending the regular orthodox colleges of the government and the lower castes the missionary institutions.²⁴ The whole concept of education favoring the highest caste was denounced by some missionaries as an abdication of the government’s Christian duty to ameliorate the condition of the downtrodden.²⁵ Nor were they convinced by government claims about the positive effects of English studies in altering attitudes to caste. As the Serampore missionary John Marshman sardonically remarked, “I am not certain that a man’s being able to read Milton and Shakespeare, or understand Dr. Johnson, would make him less susceptible of the honour of being a Brahmin.”²⁶

But at the same time, the missionaries were not above soliciting the patronage of the upper castes. If English literature marked the boundary between classes, missionaries resolutely tried to cross it by offering English literary instruction in their institutions as well, even though their commitment was supposedly to education of the masses in the vernaculars. The missionaries’ bid to lure members of other castes into their schools through a course of studies in English literature also showed that they took seriously the warnings sounded in certain quarters about the danger of offering special encouragement to the lowest castes, for, as the “most despised and least numerous of society,” there was the distinct possibility that “if our system of education took root among them, it would never spread farther, and in that case we might find ourselves at the head of a new class superior to the rest in useful knowledge, but hated and despised by the castes to whom these new attainments would always induce us to prefer them.”²⁷

The divisions between Hindus and Muslims grew even wider with state education in 1854, which put the finishing stroke to the influence of the Muslims as the former ruling group in India. British accounts ob served that Hindus tended to seize opportunities offered by state education more than Muslims did. By 1871 only 92 Muslims to 681 Hindus held gazetted appointments in Lower Bengal, a province that a hundred years earlier had been officered by a few Englishmen, a sprinkling of Hindus, and a multitude of Muslims. A similar change occurred in the only secular profession then considered open to well-born Muslims: law. With the organization of state education in 1854, different tests of fitness were prescribed and a new breed of professional men came to the fore. Out of240 native pleaders admitted from 1852 to 1868, no fewer than 239 were Hindus; only one Muslim was in the High Court of Calcutta.²⁸ In the next higher grade of attorneys there were twenty-seven Hindus and not a single Muslim. Among articled clerks, there were twenty-six Hindus and again not a single Muslim. William Hunter, who presided over the Indian Education Commission of1882, was sternly critical of the role of state education in creating these occupational patterns along religious and caste lines: “Alike therefore in higher official employments, and in the higher practice of law, Muhammedans had fallen out of the race in Bengal before the end of the first fifteen years of State Education on lines laid down in 1854.”²⁹

WOOD’S DISPATCH despaired of ever achieving a unified culture, and the more the prospect of its attainment receded, the greater grew the conviction that once a secular policy in education had been adopted, there was no choice but to accept differentiation as a principle of social and cultural organization. This position was spelled out most sharply by Holt Mackenzie, secretary to the Bengal government, in his communications to the governor-general on the education question.³⁰ Though he made an attempt to appeal to higher motives for the creation of a truly enlightened system of education in India, in the end he admitted that the only alternative open to the government was to attend to the instruction of the educated and the influential classes. Conceding that it was impossible to educate the masses in English or even in European thought through vernacular translations, he argued that the limitation lay not only in the enormous numbers to be instructed, in contrast to the number of qualified teachers available. Rather, Britain was also hobbled by its commitment to observing religious neutrality in India, which could only be ensured by a differentiated education. The situation in England, Mackenzie argued, was more conducive to a unified culture in that its parish schools, which had mostly carried on the work of general education, were identified closely enough with the religion of the country to assist the state in imparting a common education:

Take from the peasant his Bible, and (if it be possible) the knowledge and sentiments that have flowed from that sacred source, and how worthless will be his lowly literature. The education indeed of the great body of the people can never, I think, be expected to extend beyond what is necessary for the business of life; and it is only therefore through religious exercises, which form a great part of the business of life, that the labourer will turn his thoughts on things above the common drudgery, by which he earns his subsistence. Hence it is under the Christian scheme alone, that I should expect to find the labouring classes really educated: and their station in the scale of instructed and humanized beings will, I imagine, be pretty closely proportioned to their piety.³¹

But the dispatch did not abandon the Filtration Theory altogether and instead modified its cultural objectives by identifying the true diffusion of European knowledge with its adaptation to the native culture. The real value of the Filtration Theory, it emphasized, did not in any event lie in the strengthening of English culture but in the potential enrichment of the vernacular literatures, through translations of European books or the “original compositions of men whose minds have been imbued with the spirit of European advancement.”³² Deviating from the Macaulayan emphasis on the filtering down of a pure form of English thought, the dispatch referred to an earlier recommendation made by William Adam in his 1835 Reports on Education in Bengal and Bihar that the British goal should be “not to translate European works into the words and idioms of the native languages but so to combine the substance of European knowledge with native forms of thought and sentiment.”

The dispatch also hinted at what the Indian Education Commission of 1882 later confirmed: that having created a complex society through a policy favoring differentiated education, British administrators had now to reconsider the adequacy of a purely literary culture to do the work of sustaining an increasingly specialized society. This may possibly explain the halfhearted interest shown by Wood’s dispatch in high European culture as the continuing basis of modem Indian education. The problematical question was whether the task of preparing the Indians to take up their various “stations in life” was compatible with the larger goal of elevating them above the general condition of the people, as implied by a scheme of literary education.

The Indian Education Commission hedged on this question. Both in its minutes of evidence and in its final report it vacillated between commitment to the cultural premises of the Filtration Theory (that invigoration of the native society could best be achieved by the spread of European ideas) and promotion of a scheme for educating Indian youth in their traditional callings. On the one hand, it noted that one favorable outcome of the Filtration Theory was that there was an increase in the number of occupations requiring “culture” and recommended that there should be a corresponding amount of culture in those preparing for them.³³ But on the other, it recommended that literary studies—the fountain of European culture—should not be required of youth if they lacked a literary bent of mind and that these students should instead be encouraged to go into a non-literary or commercial stream. But what this virtually amounted to was endorsement of stratification within the ranks of public service, for those educated in the practical division of the high school, intended to fit students for commercial or non-literary pursuits, were eligible only for “subordinate” public appointments and not for “those offices of responsibility and emolument in which a high degree of intelligence is required, and for which a liberal education has been commonly thought necessary.”³⁴ By “offices” were meant the Revenue and Judicial departments, the branches of government that employed the most numbers of Indians.

The Commission desperately tried to mediate between these two positions and sought to find a middle ground where literary and “practical” education could meet: “The extension of this [practical] knowledge should be along those lines where it will be grasped and incorporated by the interests and teachings of active life. Still it should be education, aimed at making the mind robust and flexible, rather than at shabbily decking it with some rags of ‘business information’ of low technical skill.”³⁵ In its own ambiguous way the Commission made feeble attempts to resolve the seeming incompatibility of the two goals. But it was at best an evasive reply that did nothing to address the real problem at hand.³⁶

Those who harangued most loudly against education for social mobility also expressed an open dislike and suspicion of literary education. The Utilitarian writer Monier Monier-Williams was among the most vocal critics to raise serious questions about the desirability of diffusing European culture to the lower ranks of society. To his mind this was an impossible, if not dangerous, task. In dismissing the possibility of any reconciliation between literary and practical education, he gave a solid stamp of approval to the ideological premises of stratification. He was inflexible on the point that the sons of persons of low social status not be given an education above the rank of their fathers and that any training they received should be suited to their position and prospects in life. The aim, he contended, should be to educate them in their stations rather than above them, to make the son of a potter a better potter, the son of a mechanic a better mechanic, and so forth.³⁷

A similar implacability can be seen in Henry Sumner Maine’s views on literature, the study of which assumed a mind that was capable of being driven by reason, an assumption that Maine felt was entirely inappropriate in the Indian context. Maine, who was Legal Member of the Supreme Council of India and one of the great legal minds of his time, had little faith in the perfectability of human beings; human nature remained for him fickle, variable, and totally intractable. To work upon it as if it were otherwise was simply to engage in a futile and wasteful endeavor. However, in a secular pedagogy of impersonal law he found a more stable and constant alternative. Not unlike Lord Cornwallis, the steely, uncompromising governor-general who preceded him by almost a century, Maine steadfastly insisted that a good government was held together not by moral criteria or by men of character and integrity but by political principles and laws and in these alone rested absolute authority. Any form of education that trained for critical thinking, self-development, or moral reasoning was useless unless it dearly and openly aimed at the affirmation of these principles and laws.

In Maine’s view, liberal education gave Indians the illusion that they could be better than they actually were and that they were being empowered to change their personal destiny and affect the course of things. This, he maintained, would have the most disastrous effect on the running of government, which he conceived of as a pure and efficient machine functioning independently of the character or dispositions of men. Maine represented a later voice in English education, the voice of constitutional liberalism, which foresaw that literary study advanced for purely moral reasons would only add new weapons to error, that “the permanent conquest of falsehood will never come from the discovery of moral truths.”³⁸ Deploring what he called the “tenderness of the Eastern imagination,” he argued that while classical education could be favored over empirical study in England because there the imagination never overruled reason, in India the same course would be catastrophic, for the native mind required (as he put it) “stricter criteria of truth”:

An uncompromising Utilitarian, Maine was highly alarmed about the possible consequences of the Indians’ receiving an overly literary education, one of which was to allow them to believe that their history and belief were capable of coexisting with modern knowledge. Already one effect of exposure to imaginative literature was that the Indians had caught from Europeans “the modern trick of constructing by means of fiction an imaginary past out of the present, taking from the past its externals but building in the susceptibilities of the present.”⁴⁰ Though Maine lets the point pass and makes no further references, it is worth noting that the literary efforts of early Indian nationalists were precisely in this direction. Nationalist writers like the Bengali novelist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, who were schooled in the best Western literary establishments in Bengal, turned their attention to reviving myths and tales of the past to stir up longings in the people for the return of a golden age. Maine’s allusion to the spirit of reconstruction of a Romantic past strongly suggests that he saw as potentially insurrectionary the literary model of German Romanticism. The fact that educated Indians were reading Goethe in translation caused infinitely greater concern in British administrative circles than their reading the works of political liberals like Locke or Hume, whose appeal to reason and constitutionalism rather than the imagination presumably posed fewer dangers of shaping a unified nationalist sentiment.

With Maine the severing of the moral impulse from English education is complete. In upholding a secular vision, Maine gave Utilitarianism in India a sterner cast, investing more faith in physical rather than moral laws. Typically, he refused to concede that the pattern of studies evolving in England had any applicability to India. He based his claim on the view that the characters of the two nations were so totally different as to warrant an entirely different educational emphasis. To his mind education grounded in a theory of morality only gave the Indians more leeway to continue with their erroneous ways of thinking and the British administration was only deluding itself when it believed that the Indian character would be strengthened by a moral pedagogy.

Curiously, while the moral imperative shaped and gave an identity to English studies in India, only to blend with and eventually be superseded by the practical and the scientific, in England, where the institutionalization of English took much longer (English literature became a class subject there only as late as 1872, following Matthew Arnold’s complaints against its exclusion), the moral motive gained rather than lost in importance. As D. J. Palmer points out, the second half of nineteenth-century England saw a transition in the attitude toward English as a practical field of study to a “profound conception of the moral power of great literature, a belief in its humanizing influence, counteracting malignant forces in a rapidly changing society.”⁴¹ But for Maine and other Utilitarians in India like Monier Monier-Williams, who joined their voices with Maine’s, this conception of an education in literature and the arts had little meaning in India. On the contrary, they found that the humanizing motive was in fact an evasion of responsibility toward equipping the Indian with the knowledge required for making him useful to society. Clearly, for both men the starting point of educational reform had to be the redirection of mind to a full recognition of economic and political order and not some vague abstraction called moral character.

Once the creation of a specialized work force was agreed on as the primary objective, reports were commissioned to determine possible obstacles to its realization. Intriguingly, the single greatest threat was believed to come from Indian folklore, which, in the opinion of at least one commentator, cultivated the myth of upward mobility:

With regard to the lower orders excluded from all participation in the honour or profits of our government, they cannot feel as interested in it as in a government in which the lowest individual might hope to rise to rank and power by his personal exertions. Their common sayings, their tales, their aphorisms, are full of allusions to those vicissitudes of human life, by which the humble and obscure are so often elevated.⁴²

SIMULTANEOUSLY, THERE was increasing resentment against Utilitarianism as a philosophy that had polluted literary study, thwarting it from fulfilling moral functions. In the name of utility, literary education had become merely a mechanical acquisition of knowledge that neither required nor encouraged any of the finer qualities of literary culture (style, good judgment, taste) or moral discrimination. The study of English literature had merely succeeded in creating a class of Babus (perhaps the Indian equivalent of the English Philistines of whom Matthew Arnold wrote so scathingly) who were intellectually hollow and insufficiently equipped with the desirable amount of knowledge and culture. English education came to be criticized for its imitativeness and superficiality and for having produced an uprooted elite who were at once apostates to their own national tradition and imperfect imitators of the West. English education had failed to make “good English scholars, good Christians, or good subjects of the Queen,” in that order.⁴⁵ Lord Curwn, who was quick to fault his countrymen for misguided educational policies, also lamented the unfulfilled promises of English literary education: “Everywhere it was words that were studied, not ideas. The grain was being spilled and squandered, while the husks were being devoured…. But of real living, the life of the intellect, the character of the soul, I fear that the glimpses that were obtainable were rare and dim.”⁴⁶

To make matters worse, English-educated Indians were equally complicit with the project of annihilating the literature and language of the masses. As a disenchanted writer for the Calcutta Review wrote:

But paradoxically, while Christian moralists attacked Utilitarianism for its neglect of the spiritual life, Utilitarian educational practice was criticized as strongly in India for not being utilitarian enough, for not steering the native mind away from mundane and useless preoccupations. Even the institutions that had matured with the spread of English education—the literary societies, public lectures, and debating clubs—had become empty forums. While some Englishmen lauded the imitation of the structure of societies in England and regarded the Indians’ ability to quote from Hume, Gibbon, Reid, Bolingbroke, Voltaire, Shakespeare, and Milton as a measure of their “mental improvement,”⁴⁸ a large majority of Englishmen felt that the rising young talents of India were wasting their energy and time on purposeless disquisitions on abstract questions. (One such topic, debated with great vigor and energy at Hindu College’s Literary Society, was “whether posthumous fame be a rational principle of human action or not.”⁴⁹)

Mediocrity became the route to fame, and even the best writers fell into the trap of repeating the greatest number of truisms in order to acquire renown. Not much better were the interminable literary disquisitions in which, as one report sardonically put it, “young Babus undertake to reveal to the admiring world beauties in Milton which Macaulay never perceived, and archaisms in Shakespeare which Halliwell never detected.”⁵⁰ Most alarmingly, talented young minds were being diverted by fruitless and trivial literary pursuits from dealing with more pressing social problems. The literary mania was particularly acute in Calcutta where, out of any seventeen essays written for these societies (which were designed as a forum for exchange of ideas of general intellectual interest), ten would have been on the merits of Pope, two on Milton’s Paradise Lost (“Young Bengal has no idea of Comus”), two on Shakespeare’s tragedies, and one on Kalidas.⁵¹

But explanations for the limited and partial influence of the literary societies in India were not hard to find, and as on other occasions, Indian deficiencies of character bore the brunt. No literary society in India, after all, could be expected to assume the position of literary societies in England, “where elaborate papers are read to men with minds of a high calibre.” In imitating the structure of the English literary societies, the Indian version had forgotten that its object was “to train, to discipline, to lead out the dormant faculties of passive Hindoos and not to appeal to them as having minds already developed and educated.”⁵²

The kinds of publications that were coming out of these societies were denounced no less severely. One such book by G. Lewis that appeared as a critical commentary for reading Shakespeare seemed to verify a growing suspicion that “the spirit of pedantry [had] fled from Britain to India.” Far from offering a richer education in literary excellence, such books helped to do nothing more than complement the mechanical literary instruction given in the government colleges:

It is impossible not to detect a certain ambivalence on the part of the British toward giving an education to Indians that would be wholly on the side of the practical and the useful. While on the one hand colonial administrators charged their subjects with being too speculative, on the other they admitted that one virtue of having a contemplative, dreamy-eyed set of subjects was that it kept them from pursuits of gain.⁵⁴ A minute issued by Francis Warden claimed that the “present depressed state of trade is peculiarly favourable to the conversion of a commercial spirit into a literary one.”⁵⁵ If Indians were given a desire for reading, he suggested hopefully, they could be lured away from their traditional commercial ventures, allowing the British to step into that field.

The same motive would surely appear to be behind the staunch Anglicist Charles Trevelyan’s abrupt volte-face in the parliamentary sessions when he urged that the British encourage Indian art as a compensation for the material losses the Indians had suffered as a result of the heavy import duty on manufactures.⁵⁶ The equation that is made here between art and material wealth is absurd enough to indict it as an offensive solution. But in the context of the numerous governmental reports that attributed the “sorry state” of Indian culture to the “gradual but general impoverishment of the country”⁵⁷ and charged Britain with “shutting up all the sources from which the magnificence of the country was derived,” while not themselves constructing a single work,⁵⁸ and with importing English literature into India in the same manner that English cottons were,⁵⁹ Trevelyan’s solution would not have appeared at all outrageous, for it suggested giving to the Indians something they valued but which had no value for the British whatsoever. The British, in other words, had nothing to lose and the Indians everything to gain. Converting loss into gain runs parallel to converting the commercial spirit into the literary, both power moves aiming to render the Indian politically weak but at the same time contented with his situation.

Quite possibly, one may attribute the discrepancy between stated goals and actual practice to the existence of widely differing schools of opinion among administrators and divergent views on the nature of British rule and the conditions of Indian society. But on the whole, as David Lelyveld observes, British administrators tended to diagnose failures of an English-style education in terms of Indian culture, not of British policy.⁶⁰ In the voluminous Calcutta University Commission Report 1917–19, the general consensus of those who submitted evidence was that despite the attempt to introduce a useful education, the Indians somehow managed to convert even the practical into the impractical and the useless, so much so that “the present B.A. would be more intelligible to Shakespeare’s contemporaries than to the moderns.”⁶¹ The Indian predilection for “useless” literature was hardly new, or so one must believe from letters written to the editor of the Calcutta Gazette as early as 1816. Curious to see what books were bought at a public auction, one writer was dismayed to find that there was no demand for the histories of Greece, Rome or anything “of serious or national nature.” On the contrary, Indians had bought up all the copies of Sorrows of Werther, Life of Rochester, Byron’s Works, Scott’s Poetical Works, Spirit of English Wit, and Spirit of Irish Wit. “Is it not a disgrace, Mr. Editor, that such trash as I have mentioned should be sought after with so much avidity in India?”⁶²

Cut off from a social context where literature was assimilated into daily life, literary education in India became narrowly restricted and depended almost exclusively on material incentives in order to retain its authoritative hold. But where material rewards were not forthcoming, the social control that literature as moral study was able to exert in England collapsed in India. John Murdoch, surveying the effects of English education on Indian youth, wrote: “Educated young men of the present day betray a want of gentleman-like bearing in their social intercourse with their superiors and elders, whether European or Native, and that evil is a growing one, and seems coincident with the general spread of education throughout the country.”⁶⁴ The growing insubordination of Indian youth was blamed on the British policy of promoting literary training for entry into the professions, to the neglect of the making of gentlemen through which respect for authority could be enjoined. In one of the most severe condemnations of English education, Murdoch concluded: “Our young men do not know or care to know how to respect their superiors. This may appear strange, for the Natives of India are known to be fastidiously polite. English education has made them self-sufficient, and infused into their minds a kind of false independence which knows of no distinction between high or low, old or young.”⁶⁵

The key phrase is “false independence,” for it could not be said in India as it was in England, where the attractions of learning were supposedly more diffuse, that

Educated Indians living under foreign rule were deprived of access to precisely this “honest honourable independence.” The tension between the upward mobility promised by modem studies and the limited opportunities open to the colonized for advancement exposed the fundamental paradox of British imperialism: economic exploitation required the sanction of higher motives, but once colonial intervention took on a moral justification—that is, the improvement of a benighted people—the pressure to sustain the expectations of the people by an equalization of educational opportunities created new internal stresses. Nothing less than the most extraordinary political agility was called for in reconciling the democratic promise with the division of labor required for a capitalist system of production to flourish. The price of failure of course was the exposure of the moral pretensions of British colonialism. At one level, education as part of the state is complicit with the reproduction of an economic and cultural order. But because education is also expected to provide opportunities for advancement, it becomes an arena of social conflict, and this tension ultimately reduced the British administration to a position of acute vulnerability and paralysis.